Family Photo Archive

[SYM-J]

I'm looking to put together archives storage for family photos and videos that can be accessed through the internet by anyone I want.  Also I want users to be able to upload and download their own family photos efficiently.  I have the opportunity to buy a Dell PowerEdge C1100 1U Server: 

 

((X2) Xeon L5520 Quad Core Processors
48GB ECC DDR3 RAM
(4) 3.5” drive bays with caddies
NO DRIVES INCLUDED)

 

for a total price of $180... is this a good deal? Also will something like this work for what I'm trying to do. I can't find much info online so any and all help is much appreciated or if you have any suggestions or how would be best for me to go about software-wise as well.    

 

Thxs, SYM-J

[Mmore]

You got a place to put it? Just keep in mind it will be very loud and fairly power hungry. The CPUs were fairly power efficient at the time but the platform as a whole is almost 10 years old now. But at that price it's not a bad deal either...

 

Something more modern will probably earn itself back in power savings. For what you're looking at (Nextcloud?) the machine is very overkill, but you can do a ton of other stuff with it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A simple NAS will  do what you describe you want to do (sharing family pictures and giving them a place to put it), do you have any idea what software you want to run, specifically? And if you're planning to do anything else in the future on the same system? 

[COUPER MILLAR]

That should be enough power to run what you are wanting. I have a similar set up running pfsense and a windows VM as a game/teamspeak server. Your biggest issues are going to be storage space and network bandwidth. you will want to do some research into the max size drive that the system will recognize. As @Mmore stated its an old system and most likely have issues with drives over 2tb. 

you also need to consider what type of internet connection you are getting. your upload speed will dictate how fast you can backup photos and other media remotely. Most ISP's give an asymmetric link so your download speed is great, but your upload speed is garbage. 

[SYM-J]

9 hours ago, Mmore said:

You got a place to put it? Just keep in mind it will be very loud and fairly power hungry. The CPUs were fairly power efficient at the time but the platform as a whole is almost 10 years old now. But at that price it's not a bad deal either...

 

Something more modern will probably earn itself back in power savings. For what you're looking at (Nextcloud?) the machine is very overkill, but you can do a ton of other stuff with it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A simple NAS will  do what you describe you want to do (sharing family pictures and giving them a place to put it), do you have any idea what software you want to run, specifically? And if you're planning to do anything else in the future on the same system? 

A few of The reason I want to go with a more traditional server rather than a NAS is... 1) so I can teach myself how to do servers. I've been building PCs since I was 11 but I would like to get a job someday in something tech and I feel knowing the ins  and outs of servers would help the chances.  2) I rendered and edit videos of my drone which are in 4k. Right now on my current rig I only have 16gb of memory (since it is really just meant for gaming) so i was hoping that once I get it rolling and start to understand it I'll be able to Outsource my rendering to the server at some point. 

[SYM-J]

9 hours ago, COUPER MILLAR said:

That should be enough power to run what you are wanting. I have a similar set up running pfsense and a windows VM as a game/teamspeak server. Your biggest issues are going to be storage space and network bandwidth. you will want to do some research into the max size drive that the system will recognize. As @Mmore stated its an old system and most likely have issues with drives over 2tb. 

you also need to consider what type of internet connection you are getting. your upload speed will dictate how fast you can backup photos and other media remotely. Most ISP's give an asymmetric link so your download speed is great, but your upload speed is garbage. 

When I run a speed test i get anywhere from 25mbs - 75mbs ( I have Comcast ) my uploads are much better tho at 250mbs - 300mbs.  Do you think this would be okay for what I'm trying to do? Also I still have not decided on an operating system yet.  Never set up a VM before but I'm always trying to learn new things so maybe that's the way to go.  

[COUPER MILLAR]

45 minutes ago, SYM-J said:

When I run a speed test i get anywhere from 25mbs - 75mbs ( I have Comcast ) my uploads are much better tho at 250mbs - 300mbs.  Do you think this would be okay for what I'm trying to do? Also I still have not decided on an operating system yet.  Never set up a VM before but I'm always trying to learn new things so maybe that's the way to go.  

That's really surprising that your upload is higher than your download on Comcast. Usually they max out upload speeds at 25mbit/sec. 250-300 is 30-35mb/sec which should be sufficient. I'm running a plex server in a similar upload speed and it works great. 

 

One issue I see with your 4k rendering to this new server is that the CPUs are old, they were released q1 2009. This isn't to say that they weren't great at the time, but they will get choked to death trying to run 4k renders. For a comparison, your dual cpu set up will have similar performance to a ryzen r3 1200, and is about 15% less powerful than an i3 8100 based on cpu benchmark scores. These aren't perfect comparisons, but it give you a better idea of what to expect.